Shout - at a glance status

April 21st, 2008

Inspired by a recent 37 Signals blog post A peek at In/Out, an internal app at 37signals, we decided this would be great for the Litmus team as well. A quick glance overview of what everyone is working on at this moment in time.

Not wanting to go too overboard and create something we never went and updated, we decided to tie it into Twitter which we all use anyway. Direct Messages fit the bill perfectly as we weren’t too keen on broadcasting the inner workings of Litmus across the internet.

Merb was the framework of choice for this little web app. Using the Twitter Gem to check the direct mail of an account we set up, it then republishes the messages to a page we can all view inside our management app. Merb worked a treat, and we got the app up and running in a couple of hours, a quick style overhaul from Paul and we had the app live and in use from today.

We hooked the app into a Fluid browser and Paul knocked up a little applescript app that posts a direct message to the correct Twitter account.

We’re all really impressed with the result…

The plan is to release this app via Github once it has been cleaned up a bit and properly tested, check back here for details of its release.

I should point out that while we were playing around with this we called it “in/out” (that’s what appears in the screen shot) but obviously the fine people at 37 Signals have already used this name. Therefore our app is known as “Shout”.

Standardise flash messages across your app

July 19th, 2007 In the admin areas of apps I have been writing recently I've found myself writing the same block of code over and over. In these pretty mundane admin areas, after any action has completed or a rescue block has been triggered for ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound I like to show a quick "XXXXX Record Created" /"Could not find XXX with that ID" and then redirect people back to a safe place.

To solve my problem I created a double team-up of TextMate snippets and an addition to ActionController to make my coding quicker, and to standardise these messages across the whole app.

Read the rest of this entry

Rails Plugin - Shiny-render

December 21st, 2006

Dave of Shiny Development and Afeeda fame has released a new plugin for Rails called Shiny Render

It’s a simple patch but one I think would be quite suited for merging with simply_helpful

Basically it allows you to pass an HTML tag to wrap around any collections that are rendered in a partial and suppresses the tag if nothing is rendered.

The example Dave gave me was:

<%= render partial => "tag", :collection => current_user.tag_names, parent_tag => 'ul' %>

Very nice, visit the RubyForge project for Shiny-render to submit your patches and ideas to Dave

Rails Documentation Project

December 18th, 2006

What has happened to the attempts to fully document Rails? A while back, caboo.se launched a drive to raise money for paying authors to write up the largely undocumented and #nodoc Rails API but after collecting $16000 we still don’t seem to be getting anywhere.

I will put my hands up and admit that I have yet to contribute any money, but the reason I am posting about this now is because I do keep checking to see if anything is happening with the intent of throwing in $50 or so once the project gets moving – so far I’m not seeing this.

Considering that the original article says they are looking for $5000 to get the project started, then what’s the hold up?

What we really need in Rails is a solid documentation project aimed at developers working with the language everyday, which is fast to lookup, contains well researched examples of how to use the api and which offers the content in a variety of different formats (XML, RSS, HTML) for use in things such as dashboard widgets/custom browsers/textmate bundles.

So far all that seems to exist is a Stikipad Wiki for the project – come on guys, we need to keep up with the Django book project